Withdrawing to Stay In: Abu Shehadeh’s Dilemma
Gadi Hitman and Alona Itskovitch
At first glance, the Supreme Court’s decision to approve the Arab parties’ participation in the elections for the 26th Knesset looked like just another chapter in the familiar ritual of every Israeli election campaign. The script is known in advance: the Central Elections Committee, made up of representatives of the political parties, votes to disqualify slates and candidates from Arab society; the headlines rage and the public debate heats up; and then the Supreme Court steps in, overturns the decision, and puts everyone back in the race.
That is what happened with Azmi Bishara in 2003, with Balad and Ra’am-Ta’al in 2009, with Haneen Zoabi in 2013 and 2015, and with Balad again in 2019 and 2022. The committee disqualifies, the court reinstates. Over the years, this pattern has become almost a fixture of the political calendar: the disqualification in the committee serves the parties that initiate the petition as a statement to their voters, while the reinstatement by the High Court serves the parties targeted by the petition as proof that they must fight for their very right to sit in the Knesset.
This time, however, behind the expected outcome, something different happened. A close look at the case of Sami Abu Shehadeh, the chairman of Balad, reveals that the real story of the current proceedings is not what the court ruled, but what it did not rule. At the center of that story is a single decision by Abu Shehadeh himself, one that says a good deal about the direction in which Arab politics in Israel is probably heading.
The Legal Calculation: Between a Principled Stand and Setting a Precedent
The petition to disqualify Abu Shehadeh was filed by Otzma Yehudit and Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. It was based on an article he published in Arabic on the Arab48 website on October 8, 2023, one day after the massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists against thousands of Israelis, while fighting in the communities near the Gaza border was still under way. In the article he wrote: “It has become clear that this is an important historic event in the military, political and strategic sense,” and also: “Moreover, if small, besieged Gaza was able to do this, and at this level, others can do it more effectively and more simply” (translated from Arabic). The last sentence is at the heart of the dispute. The petitioners saw it as a call to emulate the attack, while Abu Shehadeh and his lawyers argued that the context was preventing intelligence infiltration, not military action. The article makes no reference to the Israeli civilians who were murdered and abducted.
The timing is part of the story: what might have been read on ordinary days as sharp political commentary was read and perceived differently in those days, by the Jewish public. This time the Attorney General and the State Attorney’s Office, which in previous cases tended to oppose disqualifying Arab candidates, supported the disqualification before the court. In their view, the article expresses support for Hamas’s armed struggle against Israel, in line with the third ground under Section 7A (explained below). In the expanded hearing, justices considered to hold liberal views, such as Justice Daphne Barak-Erez, also joined this position and saw the statements as crossing a red line. Abu Shehadeh, for his part, argued that he wrote the article before he grasped the scale of the atrocities, that had he known he would not have published it, and that he never called for violence or supported the events of October 7. His lawyers added that some of what he wrote had been misunderstood in translation from Arabic.
After Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit made clear during the hearing that a majority for disqualification was emerging and recommended that Abu Shehadeh withdraw his candidacy, Abu Shehadeh faced two paths:
1. Go all the way: refuse the recommendation and absorb a ruling disqualifying him. Such a step would have turned him into a symbol and served, in his eyes and those of his supporters, as living proof of the limits of the system’s tolerance toward Arab leaders.
2. Withdraw his candidacy: accept the court’s recommendation, give up his personal run in the upcoming elections, and clear the way for the Joint List to continue in the race.
Abu Shehadeh chose the second path. The official statement issued by the Joint List after the decision said the step was taken out of responsibility for the continuation of the political project and parliamentary representation.
This move has a direct legal consequence: it prevented the Supreme Court from issuing a reasoned ruling on the matter. To understand why this matters, one needs to know the tool at the center of the hearing: Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset. The section lists three grounds on which a slate or a candidate may be barred from running for the Knesset: denial of the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, incitement to racism, and support for the armed struggle of an enemy state or a terrorist organization against Israel.
Theoretically, this is a broad provision. In practice, the Supreme Court turned it into a tool that is almost never used. It required evidence that is “convincing, clear and unequivocal,” held that the prohibited goal must be central to the slate or candidate rather than an offhand remark, and required concrete activity to advance it, not merely the expression of an opinion. This high bar is what turned disqualifications in the committee into a ritual, and reinstatement by the High Court into a nearly foregone conclusion.
Had a ruling disqualifying Abu Shehadeh been issued, a new precedent would have been created: “the Abu Shehadeh rule.” The concern within Balad and among opponents of the disqualification was not about disqualifying a single candidate, but about what it would say about the bar: that a single article, written at a charged moment, is enough to remove a person from the democratic game. In their view, in every future election campaign the Elections Committee, a political body in which the majority decides, could search the past of every Arab candidate for a single post, interview or speech and present it as sufficient evidence. The decision to withdraw can be read as a preference for systemic and strategic considerations over the personal struggle: on the systemic level, it prevented a change in the bar; on the strategic level, it allowed the rest of the slate to complete the current election race without disruption.
The Disqualification That Was Never Written
It is worth pausing for a moment to notice what has actually been created here: a situation in which almost every party gains something. The court reached the outcome a majority of the justices supported, without writing a reasoned ruling that would have been attacked from both directions: from the left, as a curtailment of political free speech, and from the right, as yet more proof that the court decides questions that are not its own. And all this at a time when relations between the court and the political echelon are already strained. Balad, for its part, avoided a precedent it feared, and the Arab Joint List kept its place in the race.
Some will see a price in this arrangement as well. Instead of a written ruling, with clear reasoning that can be debated, appealed and changed, an informal mechanism was born: “disqualification by recommendation.” The President of the Court signals the existence of a majority in favor of disqualifying the candidate; the candidate takes the hint and withdraws. There is no ruling, no written criteria, and no legal record from which the next candidate can learn exactly where the line runs.
When Balad Thinks Like Ra’am
There is also a political irony in Abu Shehadeh’s decision. Since its founding, Balad has been the party of principle: a party that emphasizes national identity, advocates “a state of all its citizens,” and refuses to play the coalition game. When Mansour Abbas led Ra’am into the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, in exchange for budgets and commitments on crime, housing and infrastructure, Balad was among the harshest critics of the move, portraying it as trading identity for money. Five years later, it was Balad’s chairman who made a move grounded in the logic Abbas brought to Arab politics: not what correctly expresses the principle, but what serves the public in the long run. Abu Shehadeh has not abandoned his positions, and withdrawing a candidacy should not be confused with joining a coalition. But the judgment that guided him (giving up the symbol for the sake of a possible result, meaning Arab members serving in the Knesset to improve the lives of Arab citizens) is precisely the consideration Balad rejected in the past.
This is no small sacrifice. A disqualification by the High Court could have been an electoral asset. In Arab politics, external pressure is often a driver of turnout: raising the electoral threshold before the 2015 elections is what gave birth to the Joint List and to one of the highest turnout rates in Arab society in years. A candidate disqualified by the Supreme Court could have become a story that brings people out of their homes on election day. Abu Shehadeh chose to give up that possibility.
Whether this signals a deeper change, a gradual shift of Arab politics as a whole from a politics of protest to a politics of results, it is still too early to say. But it no longer looks like an isolated case.
There is one more important lesson. On the public level, the Supreme Court president’s recommendation that Abu Shehadeh effectively disqualify himself draws a clear line between what is permitted and what is forbidden, not only legally but also in terms of values and morality. If life and death are in the power of the tongue, then Sami Abu Shehadeh’s political life (and death) are in the power of the keyboard.
Between the Right to Be Elected and the Ability to Have Influence
Beyond the legal and political game, the High Court hearing brings to the surface a broader complexity concerning the relationship between the political system and the Arab street. While the democratic right to be elected was preserved in the legal arena, discourse in Arab society in recent years has been marked by growing skepticism about the benefit of parliamentary representation. For many citizens, the principled questions about participating in elections at all are giving way to a much simpler question: what do we actually get out of it?
That question is not asked in a vacuum. In Arab towns, the crisis of personal security has become the issue that overshadows everything else. The number of murder victims in Arab society jumped from about 116 in 2022 to 244 in 2023, and 2025 was the deadliest year on record, with 252 victims. Nor has 2026 brought relief: in its first half, 147 people were murdered, 15 percent more than in the same period last year. A family afraid to let its sons go out in the evening does not measure its Knesset representatives by their speeches, but by whether anything has changed in the neighborhood: enforcement, budgets, infrastructure.
Turnout figures tell the same story. In 2021, after the Joint List broke apart, turnout in Arab society plunged to less than half of eligible voters, a historic low. This was not necessarily a vote against any particular party; it reflected, among other things, the feeling that voting itself changes nothing.
The Supreme Court’s ruling does guarantee the Arab parties’ continued participation in the democratic game, but it does not resolve the tension between the right to be elected and the willingness of the political system, on the right and on the left, to see these representatives as partners in a coalition and in decision-making. The Ra’am experience showed that this is possible, but also how fragile it is: that government lasted a year and a half, and “a government dependent on Arab parties” has since become a slur in right-wing campaigns, and a subject many in the center and on the left prefer to keep away from.
This gap, between the legal right to representation and the extent of influence in reality, is at the heart of the public debate in Arab society, and it is among the most significant factors shaping turnout and trust in the system. In the eyes of many Israeli Arab, the gap turns the right to be elected into a partial promise: there is a representative in the Knesset, but no seat at the decision-making table.
Professor Gadi Hitman is the Middle East and Political Science department chair at Ariel University. Alona Itskovitch is a Ph.D student in the Department of Middle East and Political Science at Ariel University.